Like many my age, I took home my most vivid memory of Robert McNa­mara from The Fog of War, the astound­ingly good 2003 Errol Morris doc­u­men­tary. (Lots of the movie is avail­able on YouTube, includ­ing Ital­ian ver­sions, but it’s really worth sit­ting down and seeing the whole thing.) I was com­pletely unpre­pared for McNamara’s moral seri­ous­ness, and I remem­ber that even my dad, who was watch­ing with me, came away impressed by this man whom he had spend so many decades despising.

And yet what I remem­ber even more than McNamara’s per­for­mance (and despite my admi­ra­tion I’d like to think that I never forgot it was also always that, a per­for­mance) was this thought: how long will it be before we have to sit through a sim­i­lar rite of self-​flagellation by one of the archi­tects of the War on Terror? (My guess is that when it comes, it will be Con­doleeza Rice who per­forms it.)

When that time does come, I hope we’ll have some­one who will say what Howell Raines said about McNa­mara in 1995,* in an unsigned New York Times edi­to­r­ial about McNamara’s con­fes­sional memoir “In Retrospect”: